Paranoia

When April arrived, it started to get warm and everyone said that the war was definitely going to happen soon and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it. The diplomats were flying home, the flags were coming out, and the call-ups were about to begin. Walking across the bridge, I would sometimes see freight trains lumbering by, loaded with tanks or jeeps, once even the wings of airplanes, heading out West or down South. Some line had been crossed, something said or done, something irrevocable on our side or on the enemy’s, from which there was no longer any possibility of turning back. I hadn’t been following matters that closely, so I had missed exactly when things had taken a turn. Nevertheless, everyone was saying that the war was going to happen soon and there was nothing anybody could do about it, and so I said it, too.

Then May came and it got hot and Roberto broke his nose and asked me if I would visit him in the hospital. “I’m here all by myself,” he told me over the phone. Apparently, he had been lifting weights at the gym when one of his buddies, in order to emphasize some conversational point, feinted like a boxer and swung at his face. The guy had meant merely to pantomime the punch, but having just bench-pressed hundreds of pounds he had lost the ability to gauge distance, strength, or speed, and he cracked Roberto right in the nose. I wanted to question the details of this story, because Roberto was subject to hyperbole, and also because I was selfish and didn’t want to make the trip all the way across town, but I was the closest thing to family that Roberto had, and he sounded as if he had socks stuffed down his throat and up his nose.

To make matters worse, my car happened to be in the shop and according to the bus map I had to catch three buses I’d never heard of. So what should have taken me twenty minutes was going to take an hour and a half. Sitting in the back of the J-23B with the air-conditioning barely working, I stared out the window as we crawled through residential neighborhoods whose houses were all flying flags. There was no breeze, and the flags hung limply. Once in a while, there’d be a sign stuck in a window that said “Peace” or “No War,” or something to that effect, but for the most part everyone was on the same page. Ten minutes into the ride, I was sweating heavily; rivulets ran from my armpits down my sides and collected in the elastic of my underwear. This is what it must feel like for soldiers sitting on the transport, heading to battle, I thought. I was wearing shorts, and my thighs adhered to the bus seat, so that whenever I shifted my skin peeled away from the plastic. The other passengers were old hands and had come equipped with things to fan themselves with, like newspapers and magazines and even a flattened cereal box. I retrieved a discarded supermarket circular from under the seat in front of me and tried to use it, but the paper was too thin and kept flopping over, so I wasn’t able to generate any current. I folded it four times, and then four more times, and then gave up and tossed it back under the seat where I’d found it. A woman looked at me with accusation. She was waving a library book in front of her face.

“It was already there,” I said. I smiled.

“What’d you say?” she said.

I explained myself. She shrugged. She didn’t care.

At every corner, the bus hit a red light, and we’d have to sit idling for sixty seconds, and then once the light turned green and the bus made it through the intersection it would stop again to let passengers on and off, elderly people who took forever, fat people who took forever, a man in a wheelchair who took five minutes, and by the time we arrived at the end of the next block the light would be turning red again and we’d have to stop and idle and do the whole thing all over. It was abysmal urban planning, humiliating and crushing. I kept urging the bus on by tensing and twisting and leaning forward like a bowler who imagines that his body language can influence the trajectory of the ball once it’s left his hand. I blamed everyone: the bus, the driver, the passengers. I blamed Roberto for breaking his nose. Then I blamed myself for blaming Roberto. It wasn’t his fault. Nothing was his fault. His nose was just another symptom of his vulnerability and his desperation, a strange man in a strange land, alone and illegal, hoping one day to transform magically into an American and have a real life. “I’m already an American,” he’d say indignantly, haughtily, in a clipped and formal way that was supposed to emphasize the fact that he had, through extreme effort, lost all traces of an accent. “I’m an American just like you!” But he wasn’t just like me. I was blond and white, and he was dark—dark-skinned, dark-haired, from some village in Chile that nobody’d ever heard of and which he’d left twelve years earlier when his father was awarded a scholarship to study architecture at our university.

I had discovered him in the park one afternoon about two weeks after he arrived, thirteen years old, skinny and solitary, unable to speak a word of English, tossing a baseball up in the air. “¿Te gusta jugar al béisbol?” I’d said, because I’d been taking Spanish for two years, though the teacher, despite providing us with an extensive vocabulary, and showing us how to conjugate every verb backward and forward, had neglected to teach us how to construct a complete sentence save one: “Do you like to play baseball?” Roberto had gazed at me in confusion, almost terror, until finally he had responded, “Sí, me gusta jugar al béisbol.” Four years later, his father graduated with honors and the family’s visa expired, effective immediately. It was time to go back. But Roberto had no interest in going back. So they went without him, leaving him with eight months of high school to go, in an apartment that had been emptied of almost everything, including the furniture. I was there the day after. He still had his bed and his clothes, but that was about it. Standing in the void of a three-bedroom apartment that he couldn’t pay for, he tried to act chipper about his prospects at age seventeen. In his newfound independence, he had taken the opportunity to cut out pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger at various stages of his career and plaster them on the wall like wallpaper.

A few blocks from the infamous Maple Tree Heights, I had to transfer from bus one to bus two. As luck would have it, bus two was just pulling away when I arrived. Some elderly black women passed me pushing shopping carts, and one said, “That’s a shame, honey,” and another said, “That’s how they do you up here.” At the end of the street was a hill with a sharp ascent, and a billboard that read, “Welcome to Maple Tree Heights.” The billboard looked brand-new except for the fact that someone had crawled up and spray-painted “Don’t come on in here.” Every week, there was a report on the news of some unfortunate event, many of them involving white people who had lost their way and wound up wandering through Maple Tree Heights, where they were set upon and beaten for sport. Most recently, a mathematics professor had been whipped with a snakeskin belt.

It was ten o’clock in the morning, and it was already muggy. “Hitting ninety today, folks,” the weatherman had said. Everyone was saying if it was ninety in May what was it going to be in August. The sky was cloudless, and I could feel the undiluted sun beating straight down on the top of my head. There were various empty buildings surrounding me, and I had the sensation that I was being watched by someone somewhere. I felt exposed in my shorts, as if my whiteness were made manifest by the paleness of my legs. Directly across the street was an Arby’s restaurant with an American flag draped across its giant cowboy hat. I should go inside to wait for the bus, I thought. I’ll be safe there. But, as soon as I thought this, three black guys about my age came out of the restaurant with their roast-beef sandwich bags and big boots and baseball caps, and stood underneath the hat, smoking and staring at me. I put my hands in my pockets casually and looked up the street as if I were fixated on what was coming. The empty air wobbled in the heat. When I glanced back, the guys were saying things to one another, conspiratorial things. I thought about running, but running implied fright. For a moment, I had a clear picture of myself disoriented, panting, turning in error up into Maple Tree Heights.

Then I heard my name being called. “Dean!” I heard. “God damn, Dean!”

When I looked back at the three guys, I saw that they were smiling and that I knew them, two of them, that we had played together on the football team in high school. And here they came from underneath the Arby’s hat, laughing, yelling, their bags of roast-beef sandwiches in one hand, their cigarettes in the other. There was some initial awkwardness as we tried to coördinate the hand slapping and the hugging and the sandwiches and the cigarettes, but eventually we managed to greet one another properly.

I introduced myself to the third one.

“What’s up, my man?” he said. He looked skeptical.

“We thought you were the police,” Quincy said.

This made everyone laugh. The man I didn’t know laughed bitterly, and I laughed out of relief at this fortunate turn of events. Troy blew smoke out of his nose, and Quincy blew it out of his mouth, and I wanted to ask them for a cigarette, because I was eager to fortify our bond and because I only smoke when I can smoke for free. The man I didn’t know removed a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. Then he took out his sandwich and bit into it, and I could smell the roast beef.

“What are you doing all the way out here, Dean?” Quincy said. “This here is no man’s land.”

“I’m on my way to see Robbie.”

“Robbie?”

“Robbie Díaz?”

“Spanish Robbie?”

“God damn, man!”

“How’s Robbie?”

“He broke his nose.”

“That ain’t cool.”

“Tell him I said What’s up.”

“Hey, Troy,” I said. “How about letting me have one of those cigarettes?” Troy aimed his pack in my direction and out popped a cigarette halfway. A surge of nostalgia and tenderness coursed through me for the old football games. I put the cigarette to my lips with anticipation, but Troy’s matches were moist or stale, and each time I struck one it would flare up for a second and then fizzle out. After the third miss, I asked the man I didn’t know if I could use his lighter. He handed it to me grudgingly. It had a picture of an American flag on it. When I flicked the lighter, the flag fluttered as if waving in the wind.

“Let me see that,” Quincy said, and we passed the lighter around, flicking it on and off, marvelling at the trick, until the man I didn’t know said not to waste any more fluid.

“I was just thinking about getting me a tattoo like that,” Troy announced. “Right here.” He pulled up his shirt to reveal a saggy and swollen stomach. “Here to here.” He outlined the image like a teacher at a chalkboard. “Here’s where the flagpole goes.” He indicated his belly button.

“That would look good,” I said. But I was dismayed by what had happened to his body. He appeared inflated, as if he had inhaled helium and was going to float away. So did Quincy. The man I didn’t know was the opposite, tall and stringy, with ropy muscles and long fingers and protruding knuckles. He was thin but was sweating the worst. Sweat streamed down from under his baseball cap, and he dabbed at it with his handkerchief. He was oddly genteel about this. Then he cracked his knuckles loudly, aggressively. Troy pulled his shirt back down, and I had a vivid recollection of him standing in front of the locker-room mirror after one of our games, completely naked except for his cleats, flexing and preening. At fifteen, he already had a man’s body—shoulders, chest, and cock. He’d scored three touchdowns that game, and knocked one of the other team’s linebackers unconscious. Coach Slippo had given him the game ball. “I’ve got some cuts in here for you,” Troy had told the equipment manager, running his fingers through the deep creases of his stomach muscles and down to the very edge of his pelvis. Everyone had laughed. The equipment manager had blushed. Troy thought he was going to make the N.F.L. They all thought they were going to make the N.F.L. They didn’t even make college.

I sucked the smoke in and blew it out. I felt light-headed, and the smell of the roast beef was nauseating. I feared I might puke on the sidewalk.

“You O.K., Dean?” I heard Troy say. “You good?” His voice was far away. I wasn’t sure if he was asking whether my life in general was good.

“It’s hot out here,” I said. It was all I could do to maintain my balance.

“A hundred degrees?” He was incredulous. He was outraged. “If it’s ninety degrees in May, how’s it going to be a hundred degrees in August? I’m telling you, my man, it’s going to be a hundred and twenty-five degrees in August.” He stated it as if it were fact.

“Hey, Dean,” Quincy said suddenly, “you looking for a job?”

Troy said, “Dean don’t need no job.”

“They’re hiring,” Quincy said. He nodded at an abandoned building with broken windows and a sign that read Textiles Something-or-Other, Inc. The words had eroded.

“Who’s hiring?” I said.

“Mainframes, man,” Quincy said.

“Chemicals and whatnot,” Troy said.

“I don’t ask no questions about what they make,” the man said.

“I’m thrilled that the aspirations of the oppressed might be fulfilled over there but very concerned that it might spread to over here.”

“You watch,” Quincy said. “Once the war starts, they’ll be opening factories all up and down this street. There’s going to be an industrial revolution right here in the ghetto.” This broke them up. They slapped one another’s hands, stinging slaps. I smiled, but I didn’t slap.

“Where you working at now, Dean?” Troy said.

I told him.

“Damn.”

“That’s the kind of gig I want.”

“That’s what I’m going to get me,” the man I didn’t know said. He said this more to himself. Then he said to the rest of us, “I’m going to get me one of those essential jobs, so that when the draft comes they pass me up.”

“There’s not going to be any draft,” I said. It was my turn to state something as fact.

The man looked at me in astonishment. Then he guffawed and wiped his handkerchief over his entire face in one swift motion. “How you figure that one out, my man?”

I’d heard it somewhere. “It’s going to be a quick war,” I said. “Marines are going to take the peninsula first thing.” I drew in the air as if I were standing in front of a map. “Here’s the bay . . . here’s the peninsula . . . you’ll see.”

The guys got quiet as they considered this.

“Anyway,” I said cheerfully, “even if it’s a long war there’ll still be plenty of people willing to join up.”

“Plenty of people?” the man I didn’t know snorted. “This here’s the guy”—he turned to Troy and Quincy—“who thinks it’s only going to be a hundred degrees in August.”

At the hospital, the air-conditioning was going full blast, and the sweat froze on my skin. People with all sorts of ailments came and went, and I thought about how this must be what it’s like for soldiers when they get back from battle.

I wasn’t sure if Roberto had checked in under a false name, since he was nervous about being illegal. He had no driver’s license, no bank account, no phone, and his mailbox still had the name of the previous tenant, Cynthia Abernathy, on it even though she hadn’t lived there for two years. Every so often he’d get a package for her, and he’d tell the delivery guy some elaborate story about how Cynthia was his wife but she was out of town because her mother was dying and he didn’t know when she’d be back but he’d let her know that a package had come for her when he talked to her next. It was always the same story. He was positive that the I.N.S. was tracking him and the delivery guy was an agent.

He didn’t like this. “You’re going to be sorry one day,” he said. “You’re going to be sorry when they come for me. They’re going to lock me up somewhere, like they did those apple pickers, and you’re never going to hear from me again.”

“I’m looking for Roberto Díaz,” I told the receptionist.

She checked the computer. No, she said, there was no Roberto Díaz listed.

“Then I’m looking for Rob Days,” I said.

No, sorry.

“How about Bob Hays?” I was trying to recall all his permutations.

No.

“I’m looking for Tyler McCoy,” I said, because this was the name of the main character in his favorite gangster film.

The receptionist punched in Tyler McCoy, and I could tell by the way she struck the keys that she was getting suspicious or impatient. “You sure do have a lot of friends,” she said.

“I sure do,” I said, and, sure enough, Tyler McCoy was in Room 831.

He was asleep when I got there, lying on his back with his mouth wide open, like a drowning man trying to suck oxygen. He had bandages running ear to ear, and his nose, already prominent, seemed gigantic, as if he had an anvil for a nose.

I pulled up a chair next to his bed and took a seat. He didn’t wake up. From my vantage point, he looked to be all torso, as if he were lying in bed after having had his legs amputated. This was a result of his having spent ten years lifting weights constantly and incorrectly. His chest was colossal and so were his shoulders and his arms, and he had a thick blue vein in his neck that was permanently engorged as it piped gallons of blood back and forth. But his legs were thin, the legs of a teen-age girl or an insect, and they looked now to be nonexistent beneath the pale-blue hospital gown. “Why don’t you try doing some cardio every once in a while?” I’d counsel. He either didn’t care or didn’t notice that his proportions bordered on the freakish. His physique had provided him with access to those coveted manual-labor jobs which pay under the table—mover, deliverer, unloader—and that was how he had survived all these years without any aid, except what he got from me. He’d carried bricks, drywall, bales of hay. “I’ve got a special job for Robbie,” my mother had once said. He’d come over for dinner and wound up spending half an hour lugging a tree trunk from our back yard to the curb. She’d given him ten bucks. I’d yelled at her later for what I saw as an example of her condescension, but my father had intervened, saying, “Every man has to find how to make his own way in this world.”

The way Roberto was making his own way in the world now, however, was through relatively sedentary employment as an assistant to a cobbler who also happened to be his landlord and who cut him a break on the rent as well as giving him shoes if they were left in the shop past sixty days. He’d be turning twenty-five soon and needed to “start thinking seriously about my future and what my future holds for me.” To this end, he’d come up with a fairly reasonable plan that involved learning a trade, saving money, going to college, opening a business, starting a family. The cobbler paid him in cash twice a month, and so twice a month he had an enormous roll of money that he liked to show me. The roll was generally in ones and fives and added up to no more than a couple of hundred dollars, but it made him look and feel rich. “Like Tyler McCoy,” he’d say, and he’d reënact in pitch-perfect detail the scene where Tyler McCoy is trying to get one guy to go in with another guy on the heist that turns out to be a double cross. “Me. You. Now. Together.” Then we would walk to the post office, where he would buy all the money orders he needed to pay all the bills that were under the names of others. We’d wait in a long line of illegal immigrants and the occasional unfortunate American citizen who had just popped in to buy a book of stamps. When we finally emerged, an hour later, he’d be broke.

The mass of flesh suddenly shifted like an animal beneath forest leaves, and his eyes opened. They were bloodshot and bleary, and it took a moment for him to orient himself. “Oh, shit,” he said when he finally understood who I was and where we were. “You came. My man.” His voice was thick and stuffy, like air in a cellar, and I was surprised to hear the trace of an accent. It could have been an earlier version of him rising from the dead. Oh, shee. You came. My main.

“Of course I came,” I said, wounded, as if I had never contemplated otherwise. And, because I knew it would endear me to him, I added, “Tyler.”

He grinned, and the bandages pulled tight across his face, and the grin evaporated as he cried out in agony. I stood in alarm, but the pain seemed to subside quickly. He struggled out of bed, bringing both feet to the floor and forcing himself upright so that he could face me.

“This is the best guy,” he said with the utmost sincerity, as if he were introducing me to an audience. “This is the greatest guy in the whole world.”

His trunklike arms came around my shoulders and squeezed me hard, until I felt like a child, even though I was taller. I feared he was going to lift me off the ground and swing me. Instead, he laid his head against my chest, so that now he was the one who seemed transformed into a boy, hugging his father the day before he left for good.

In June, the Marines were put on high alert, and the temperature reached a hundred degrees and the bill from the hospital arrived. It was three thousand dollars.

I loaned Roberto two hundred to cover the minimum, which was a bad idea, because a few days later he called me from the cobbler’s phone to invite me over to see his “surprise.”

“What surprise is that?” I asked, but he refused to tell me, and besides he had to get back to work.

So we made a plan for the following Saturday, which turned out to be the hottest day of the year so far. It was early evening when I pulled up at his building, but it seemed to be getting hotter, as if the setting sun were drawing nearer. Roberto lived in one of those neighborhoods which were either up-and-coming or on the way out, an equal mix of college students and aluminum siding and small shops—one of which was the cobbler’s, whose awning I now stood beneath, waiting desperately for Roberto to come downstairs and let me in. His doorbell never worked, and the cobbler never fixed it, but I had been forbidden to yell up at the window. Instead, I had to arrive at a mutually agreed-upon time and stand on the sidewalk patiently and quietly until Roberto opened the door. If I showed up early, I’d have to wait; if I showed up late, Roberto would have to wait. Today I showed up right on time, but there was no Roberto. Every few minutes, the cobbler would rise from behind his shoe machine and eye me mercilessly, as if he’d never seen me before. He hated me, and I hated him. He was fat and smoked constantly, and he had a thick head of black hair that I had a theory he colored with shoe polish. He was either Italian or Greek or Armenian—we could never figure out which—and he had been in America for fifty years but still could hardly speak English. I’d got off to a bad start with him the first time I visited Roberto and screamed up at his window at eleven o’clock in the morning: “Robbie!”

“You no come here act like hoodlum,” he demanded. “Like nigger.”

“Hey! That word’s not called for!”

“I call police!”

“Fix the doorbell!”

“I fix you!”

“Fuck off!”

“That word not called for!”

“He’s my window of opportunity,” Roberto had shrieked when I told him what happened. So I went back downstairs and apologized.

“My customers good customers” was all he said.

Fifteen minutes after I’d arrived, Roberto still hadn’t come down to open the door. This wasn’t like him at all, and a subtle unease began to creep over me. I recalled the story of the apple pickers who had been rounded up by the I.N.S. in the middle of the night, and I was just on the verge of panicking when Roberto suddenly appeared from around the corner carrying a big blue box that said “DVD Player.” He was grinning freely, despite his nose still being covered with bandages that made it look as if he had a small pillow in the middle of his face.

“What’s in the box?” I said, even though it was obvious what was in the box.

“Robbie!” the cobbler said, waving. “You buy me DVD player?”

Roberto laughed, and so did the cobbler, and the cobbler’s laugh was intended to make me the odd man out.

In his apartment Roberto sat cross-legged on the floor, tearing open the box as if it were Christmas Day. Styrofoam peanuts went everywhere, and when he removed the thin silver DVD player it gleamed sharply. He smiled at it lovingly as I sat on the sofa and fumed, dripping with sweat. His apartment was even hotter than outside. It was one square room with a kitchenette, a saggy sofa bed, and three folding chairs—the bathroom was down the hall, and shared with six other tenants. All Roberto’s furniture belonged to the cobbler, and so did the television and the dishes.

“Can’t you open a window or something?” I asked.

With one gigantic arm, he swung open the window and then got back to fitting wires into inputs. Immediately, a fly came in through the window, but no breeze. I watched it settle on a plate and crawl around. Then a second fly came in. Roberto turned on the television to a game show that was nearing its climax. A woman had to pick the right color if she wanted to win fifty thousand dollars. The audience was screaming at her, and she was flustered.

“What will you do with all that money?” the host asked.

“I-I-I-I don’t know.”

“Pay back the greatest guy,” I answered for her.

“What?” Roberto said. His nose swung in my direction.

“Pay back the greatest guy in the whole world,” I said.

He stood up straight. In his small apartment, his size was immense, his camel legs notwithstanding, and as he loomed over me on the couch I felt a twinge of vulnerability.

“I told you I’m going to pay you back every penny!” he said. His face twitched and the pillow-bandage bobbed, and from his pocket he withdrew a slip of paper on which was printed the company logo of Dr. Scholl’s. Beneath this he had written in very precise script “I O Dean $200.00.” He had dated it June 14th and added his initials, as if it were an official document he was endorsing. The gesture was surprisingly touching, and I felt remorseful, even guilty, as if I were the one who owed money.

Out loud I said, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this? Get it notarized?”

“Motorized?” he said.

“Notarized!”

“On the bright side, ever since the layoff and my divorce it’s been much easier to balance work and family.”

He shrugged. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket and got back to work on the DVD player. The snivelling woman was just about to pick the color yellow when the game show was interrupted by breaking news: every branch of the military had been ordered to join the Marines on high alert—the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and branches I’d never heard of. There were maps with arrows, and the peninsula was highlighted. Plus, there was a sexy reporter interviewing soldiers at their base.

“We could be attacked without warning,” she said, dewy-eyed, thick-lipped. “Right here and now.” She wore a flak jacket, and her brown hair flowed from underneath a helmet.

“Do you miss your family?” she asked one of the soldiers.

“Yes, Ma’am,” the soldier said.

Roberto came and sat down beside me on the sofa.

The soldier looked like me: blond hair, blue eyes, an upturned nose. If he hadn’t had a twang, he could have been a surfer from Malibu. Night-vision goggles were propped on his forehead.

“Are you afraid of dying?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“We’re on the brink,” the reporter said to us.

“We’re on the brink,” Roberto said to me. The sentiment seemed poignant. I draped my arm around his enormous shoulders. I was suddenly in a forgiving mood.

“Let’s go get a DVD,” I said.

Outside, the cobbler was closing up for the night. He was trying to pull the grate down over the shopwindow, but he was having trouble because he was old and fat. Roberto ran to his aid as if he were rescuing a child from the water’s edge. He reached up with wide forearms, and in an instant the gate came crashing down onto the boiling sidewalk.

“Ah, you good man,” the cobbler said.

At the video store we browsed the titles. We agreed, finally, on one of those funny buddy road movies. Then Roberto picked a porno that he said he was going to watch later. And then he picked his favorite gangster movie, with Tyler McCoy.

I paid for all three.

Back at the apartment, there were about forty flies walking over everything, including the dishes.

“Maybe you should close the window now,” I suggested.

He complied, trapping the flies and trapping the heat. Then he went to the refrigerator and took out some bread and cheese and tuna fish, and put them on the counter where the flies were. He took out a jar of mayonnaise, and while his back was turned the flies landed on the bread and cheese and tuna fish. When he was done making the sandwiches, he put one on a plate where the flies had been and handed it to me. He sat down on the sofa bed and pressed Play. The trailers ran and the sofa sagged. Then the movie with Tyler McCoy began. I pressed Pause.

“I thought we were going to watch the other one,” I said. “The buddy one.”

“Let’s watch this one first.”

“I’ve seen it three times,” I said.

“So what,” he said. “I’ve seen it three hundred times.”

He pressed Play, and so began Tyler McCoy’s rags-to-riches story through violent and immoral means. When the characters spoke, Roberto spoke, every word, soundlessly mouthing in perfect unison.

He pressed Pause.

“Why aren’t you eating?” he asked.

“I saw a fly land on it,” I admitted.

With irritation he said, “You are opulent,” and he took the sandwich from me and bit into it, a huge, obvious bite, so that I could see the food in his mouth. “And I am indigent.”

Which was true. I’d had a DVD player for ten years.

On the Fourth of July, Roberto and I drove downtown to see the parade. The turnout was extraordinary. The largest ever, people were saying. Others said that each year should be the largest ever and people shouldn’t have to wait for a war to become patriots. “I keep my flag aht year-round,” one man said. “And yunz can come by my haas to see if ahm telling the truth.” The fountain was going even though we were supposed to be conserving water, and the parks people had somehow managed to get it to rise and fall in alternating colors of red, white, and blue. Roberto and I stood shoulder to shoulder, transfixed by the spectacle. Children played along the edge, and their parents screamed at them not to drink the water because it was poisonous.

The sun was straight overhead, but the heat felt as if it were coming from down below, from the asphalt, emanating upward through my shoes and legs and out through my scalp. I had brought along sunblock, S.P.F. 45, which I kept applying to my face and neck. Roberto looked on in fascination and amusement. His nose was almost healed except for a small red mark that ran along the bridge and which he kept pressing because he was self-conscious.

“Does my nose look big?” he asked.

“No,” I lied.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the m.c. said, and a band started up, all trumpets and drums and tubas, playing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Roberto used this as an opportunity to make his first payment. “To the best friend,” he said, holding a pile of crumpled bills. “To the greatest friend in the whole world.” Then he handed over the fistful of dollars as if he were pouring gold coins into my hands.

“Count,” he said.

“I trust you,” I said.

“Count!”

I counted twenty dollars.

He displayed the sheet of paper with the Dr. Scholl’s logo and his now updated balance sheet. He had crossed out “I O Dean $200.00” and replaced it with “I O Dean $180.00, RD,” dated July 4th.

I used the money to treat us to two foot-longs, and I was about to treat us to two more when an altercation broke out near the fountain. People pushed to get to the action, and Roberto and I pushed, too, and the m.c. said not to push. When the wall of people opened, I could see parade-goers shouting and pointing their fingers at a small ragtag group of protesters holding signs that said “War Is Not the Answer” and things of that nature.

We jeered at them, and they jeered back.

“You’re all fools,” they screamed.

“It’s the Fourth of July, for crying out loud,” a woman next to me yelled back. Her face was pink, possibly burning, and she looked close to tears. “Isn’t anything sacred to you people?”

Roberto cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “Faggots!”

People laughed.

“Hey,” I hissed. “That word’s not called for!”

Soon the police arrived to escort the protesters to a special section at the other end of the park. Then the band struck up the national anthem. We put our hands over our hearts as veterans from previous wars began marching past, starting with the Second World War. There were only a few of these, and they ambled by slowly, looking confused and displaced, their uniforms baggy like diapers and draped with medals that glinted in the sun. “Thank you,” Roberto called. “Thank you for all you’ve done!”

As the wars progressed, the soldiers got younger, until we arrived at the youngest, the new recruits. By the time they appeared, I was exhausted from the heat and from the clapping. I felt as if I were being submerged in boiling water, and I was sure that I had a terrible burn on the back of my neck. Still, I mustered the energy and pounded my hands. This was bon voyage for the soldiers—they were marching from the parade straight to the train depot. “Last stop, the peninsula!” the m.c. said. The crowd went wild as they came past in lines of twenty. Line after line. Ten minutes of lines. A mass of bodies larger than the crowd that watched. They were decked out in the latest gear, everything streamlined and advanced—goggles and helmets, tool belts and boots, lights and antennas. They resembled astronauts. Astronauts with automatic weapons.

“To the moon!” I yelled. It had a nice ring to it.

“To the moon!” Roberto yelled.

And then I saw a familiar face. I couldn’t place the face, but I knew that I knew it. I knew it vaguely. The man was tall and frail, and the helmet looked too large for his head, more like a bonnet than a helmet, and with each step it bobbled and appeared in danger of slipping off. He fumbled with the strap, trying to tighten it and keep pace at the same time. He seemed on the verge of collapse.

“I know that man,” I said.

The man reached into one of the many pockets on his jacket and withdrew a handkerchief. In one clean motion, he brought the handkerchief down across his dripping face. Then he turned and looked at me. The man I didn’t know.

“Hey,” I yelled. I smiled and waved.

He squinted. He seemed to be looking at me and then beyond me. The attitude of haughty disdain that he had had that day at the bus stop was now replaced with a look of fatigue and befuddlement. I wondered if Quincy and Troy were with him and I scrutinized the lines of marching soldiers. An instant later, the man I didn’t know had passed, and all I could see was his back, with his enormous backpack.

I called after him, “I told you there wasn’t going to be a draft!”

In August, something strange happened: it got cold. In one day, it plummeted from a record high of a hundred and seven to ninety-five degrees. This felt like relief. But after that it dropped an average of three degrees each day, until by the middle of the month it was fifty-three. In the beginning of the cold snap, everyone was happy, and then everyone was scared. Everyone was saying that if it was fifty degrees in August what was it going to be in December.

Things got busy at work, and I didn’t see Roberto for a while. We made plans and then I cancelled them, and then we made plans again. He said that he really wanted to watch that funny buddy road movie we never got to watch. He said he had my money. All of it. Or almost all of it. I wanted to tell him not to worry about it, that it didn’t matter, but it did matter, and I rationalized that paying me back would help teach him something about responsible American citizenship.

We finally arranged to meet on Saturday morning at ten o’clock.

The night before, I was lying in bed, watching the news about some bad things that had happened in Maple Tree Heights, when it was interrupted by a special report: the war had begun. The invasion was being broadcast live, lots of lights and flashes and little bursts of smoke from afar. Rat-a-tat-tat. Instead of troops landing on the peninsula, as we had been led to believe, they were coming down over the mountains. The peninsula strategy had all been a deft misdirection to fool the enemy. Ten thousand feet high, the mountains were. Up one side and down the other, a hundred thousand troops on the move. It was going to take them a week to make the crossing. What was it like, I wondered, to reach the summit?

I stayed up late, flipping back and forth between channels. The channels all showed the same footage, and all the experts agreed: “Resistance was futile.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the newscaster said, “blink and you might miss this war.”

In the morning, my car wouldn’t start and I had to walk. It was freezing. It might as well have been winter. The sun was hidden, and the wind blew hard, whipping the flags around. People drove past and honked their horns in unity.

When I got to Roberto’s apartment, I was numb. My nose was running. The gate to the cobbler’s was up, but it looked as if the shop was unattended. I pounded my hands together, and stomped my feet to get the blood going. Five minutes into waiting, I began to suspect that Roberto was about to come around the corner and “surprise” me with another box of electronics. Five minutes after that, I had to pee, and pee badly. At ten-twenty, I took my chances and shouted up to the window. “Robbie!”

Immediately, the cobbler came out. He looked at me and sucked in the sides of his cheeks.

“The doorbell doesn’t seem to be working,” I said sarcastically.

He shook his head. “No talk here,” he said. His face was tense and swollen, and he puffed hard on his cigarette. Beneath his apron, his stomach protruded, firm and round.

“Come in store,” he said. “No good talk here.”

I followed him inside. He put his cigarette in the ashtray and sat down at his machine as if he were about to get back to work. I leaned on the counter like a customer.

“Yesterday,” he said, as he rubbed his dirty hands over his face. “Yesterday they come.” He wasn’t looking at me as he spoke. Somehow his dirty hands hadn’t made his face dirty.

“Who come?” I said.

“Oh, no,” he said. He put his black palms up in defense. “I don’t ask question.”

“Who come?” I demanded.

He looked at me with horror. Slowly, stumblingly, full of error, he told me that yesterday they come for Roberto, yesterday, middle of day, four car, four car, no warning, all pull up same time, right outside, happen fast, take him way, take him. What I can do? I can do no thing. I am one man. They have law. “Hurt me as much as hurt him.” He hunched his shoulders and he looked aggrieved. He was sorry, he said. Damn sorry. “I pray for him now.”

Then some people came in with their shoes, and he stood up to help them. His pack of cigarettes was on the counter, and I took one and stuck it in my mouth and lit it. He didn’t notice. He didn’t care. My boldness surprised me.

I took the long way home. I walked fast and hard. I smoked the cigarette, and the second I exhaled the cold wind took the smoke. Down the hill and over the bridge I went. At the train tracks, I stopped and tried to get my breath. I was wheezing. A small dot appeared way down the line. After a while, it became a train. When it drew closer, I could see that it was loaded with long tubular objects, missiles no doubt, twenty feet long, thirty feet, covered with canvas and strapped down with canvas belts. As the train approached, I saw the engineer hanging his head and arm out the window and I motioned for him to pull the horn as I would have done way back when I was a kid. A moment later, I heard the blast, braaaaaammmmm; it was louder than I had remembered, longer, too, and then the train passed under the bridge as it headed out West or down South. ♦